CURRENT & UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS
Current Exhibitions:
Official opening with artists present on September 19, 2026 from 2-5 pm
gallery 1:
Shelley Niro
Karonhiá:ke Tiakoia’tén:en Iakón:kwe Teionkhiiahkwatá:se / La Femme du Ciel est partout autour de nous / Sky Woman is All Around Us
11.09.26-12.12.26
Iontkathótha iakoió’te / Commissaire / Curator: Lori Beavis
Shelley Niro: Sky Woman is All Around Us
by Lori Beavis
Shelley Niro’s work offers a powerful reimagining of Sky Woman, the foundational figure of the Kanyen’kehá:ka creation story, situating her within a contemporary, lived reality shaped by family, memory, and resilience. Drawing on a matriarchal worldview rooted in Haudenosaunee philosophy, Niro transforms Sky Woman from an ancestral origin figure into a dynamic, everyday presence embodied by the women closest to her—her mother, daughter, granddaughter, and artist friends. Through photography, painting, pastels, and multimedia experimentation, Niro creates a continuum between cosmology and contemporary Indigenous life, where humour and intimacy become strategies of survival and resistance.
In Haudenosaunee cosmology, Sky Woman is the first human, falling from Sky World to Turtle Island. She carries her unborn child in her belly and in her hands, she holds the roots she has grasped and held onto. Niro returns to this narrative as a generative metaphor for female potential, adaptability, and strength. Her Sky Woman is not distant or sacred in an inaccessible way; she is familiar. She is the woman at a powwow, a friend in the studio, or a family member. In this way, Niro collapses time, suggesting that creation is ongoing and that Indigenous women continue to enact the foundational work of Sky Woman in their daily lives.
This intergenerational emphasis is especially evident in a work like, Sometimes Mother Earth is a Lazy Teenage Girl, where granddaughter Raven spawls in the easy chair, surrounded by animals that echo the helpers of the original Sky Woman story. Rather than depicting heroic struggle, Niro offers a moment of rest. The humour is gentle but pointed: even a figure aligned with Mother Earth can take a break. This reconfiguration challenges expectations of constant resilience placed on Indigenous women, instead asserting that strength also includes ease, security, and self-possession. Raven’s posture signals confidence rooted in lineage—she inherits not only responsibility but also the right to rest within a continuum of powerful women.
Humour operates throughout Niro’s practice as both critique and affirmation. Her works often parody colonial representations of Indigenous identity, exposing their absurdity through wit rather than confrontation alone. In The Iroquois is a Highly Developed Matriarchal Society, she adopts and exaggerates anthropological language, turning it into a site of playful resistance. This same sensibility informs her Sky Woman imagery. Whether depicted in aviator goggles or casual contemporary clothing, Sky Woman becomes a figure of ironic empowerment—prepared, self-aware, and slightly irreverent. The aviator hat, recurring in several works, symbolizes readiness and vision, suggesting that Indigenous women navigate both historical weight and contemporary complexity with skill and foresight.
Beginnings and Memories of Flight from M: Stories of Women (2011), embody Sky Woman’s generative force. In the first, while her flight through space was unexpected, both the aviator hat and sunglass-goggles suggest that this woman was prepared and capable of controlling her destiny. These are images of a strong woman who will thrive as she situates herself in place and history. She is the woman who will prepare and equip the next generation, pass on the traditions, and teach the histories, skills, and knowledge of womanhood. In Memories of Flight, Sky Woman remembers and reflects on what she and others have accomplished.
Similarly, in works like Wishing a River, Continuing the Journey, Travelling Through the woman stands poised at the edge of movement, her gaze directed toward possibility. The canoe beside her signifies both physical travel and intellectual or emotional journeying, linking traditional knowledge with present-day agency.
Niro’s multimedia approach deepens these ideas by allowing Sky Woman to exist across shifting visual languages. In her Flying Woman series adapted into the multi-media sculpture, Wing (2026), the falling figure becomes abstracted, fragmented, and reassembled through collage and photographic layering. These images emphasize motion and transformation, capturing the moment of descent not as catastrophe but as possibility. In the pastels Preparing for the Fall and Losing My Stuff, Sky Woman sheds objects as she falls yet retains seeds and roots—symbols of knowledge and continuity. This act reflects both loss and intention, echoing Indigenous histories of displacement while asserting the endurance of cultural knowledge carried forward through women.
Ultimately, Niro’s work insists that Sky Woman is not a figure confined to the past but an active presence shaping Indigenous futures. Through humour, experimentation, and deeply personal imagery, she reframes creation as an ongoing, collective process carried by women across generations. Her Sky Woman falls, flies, laughs, and rests—always adapting, always creating. In doing so, Niro offers a vision of resilience that is neither static nor solemn, but vibrant, complex, and profoundly human.
gallery 2:
Carrie Allisson
Ionkwá:re Aiakwaten’nikón:raren / Prenons soin / We Tend to Care
11.09.26-12.12.26
Iontkathótha iakoió’te / Commissaire / Curator: Franchesca Hebert-Spence
Essay by Franchesca Hebert-Spence
“Time is money,” a worn adage that encapsulates the brutal reality of living within late-stage capitalism. Carrie Allison’s work in we tend to care lives within, and probes, the intersections of value, labour, and temporality by critically examining lawns, gardens, parks, and agricultural spaces. The impacts that the tangled web of capital, colonialism, and patriarchy, has on cultural production, snowballs quite quickly within Allison’s investigation: the value of her labour as a woman artist working with customary materials; the legal and social pressures to ‘maintain’ property as a civic duty in conflict with her role as a Nêhiyaw and Métis community member; and ultimately the romanticization of stolen land for the use - recreation and industry - of strengthening a colonial nation state. The thrust of Allison’s practice has been towards making temporally monumental work that draws attention to how these systems are maintained in the mundane.
Portraits of Grass, First Family and the Lawns capture Allison’s multiscalar considerations of her homes, her territory and her relationship with those lands. Portraits of Grass, intimate beaded meditations on a single shoot of grass with individual delica beads arranged precisely, document her work of removing grass from her yard which consists of clover. The gendered labour mowing the lawn versus tending the garden sit at the intersection of monocultures, productive plants versus weeds, as a whole - all while Allison cheekily extends the labour of that gesture through beadwork. These portraits are interspersed between velvet aerial depictions of lawns that carry significant milestones and moments within Allison and her family’s life: thinking through her grandmother Elsie and the garden she tended, the lawn in which she leisurely enjoyed as a teenager, and then the yard in which the legal obligation to maintain her property by external standards became entwined in her identity within the domestic. First Family is an ode to the medicinal plants on Allison’s matrilineal territory of maskotewisipiy. Beaded with a two-needle technique that builds with growing concentric circles, often used for medallions, the centre of florals or berries, the images of the medicines become abstracted. These growing circles remind me of wahkohtowin, and the reciprocal responsibilities we have to our plant-kin. While it is the earliest body of work in the exhibition, First Family grounds the dialogue, pointing to the knowledge carried by these medicines within our communities and how they continue to teach.
Allison uses replication as process to combat innocuous ways colonialism is reified, such as the ritual of maintaining grass, with equally absurd labour to highlight its strangeness. Upon which all else depends: abundance references Eadweard Muybridge’s urge to capture the bison in his chronophotography Buffalo Running (1883) for scientific study, each tufted kin contained within its respective canola yellow frame. This series single-handedly depicts the irony of the mass murder of bison, a keystone species, as acts of genocide to the Nations who relied upon them, to eliminate resistance against the theft of territory for the “productive use” and economic gain of agriculture, which in turn stripped the land (the Dustbowl) and led to the Great Depression. This story about economic pursuit is echoed in they built fields of grass on sawdust: poplar, a critique of clearcutting, where each strand of beads is propagated into a perfect square sitting upon a poplar plinth. Poplars require flooding to seed and the population is being affected by the overmanagement and prevention of natural cycles within the Poplar territories, lest flooding disrupt the bottom line of industrial agriculture. These squares in a row are reminiscent of the acreages established during the Dominion Land Survey, which still cut through and divide the landscape. These cautionary narratives culminate in Nuclear Turf where Allison has painstakingly created fringe that pools to the floor. Allison has beaded grass after a nuclear event that has mutated, growing in patches beyond what a manicured lawn is meant to be. The short trimmed stubs are a dull dry green, while the further the grass grows from the earth, the land, the blades become more reddish, and sickly, acid greens. These aren’t imaginary futures. Allison is communicating the turf takeover as our own, and our plant kins’, apocalypse.